


Of Birth Names and Tire Irons

by Naphorism



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, Batman: The Telltale Series (Video Game), DCU, DCU (Comics), Red Hood and the Outlaws (Comics)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Bruce Wayne is Batman, Bruce Wayne is Good With Kids, Bruce Wayne is a Good Parent, Child Abuse, Cigarettes, Crossover, Dead Catherine Todd, Gen, Happy Ending, Homelessness, Hopeful Ending, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Underage Prostitution, In a way, Jason Todd Deserves Better, Jason Todd Deserves Happiness, Jason Todd Needs A Hug, Jason worries tho, Light Angst, Mentioned Lady Arkham, Mentioned Oswald Cobblepot, Mentioned sex work, Past Character Death, Past Child Abuse, Swearing, Theft, Underage Smoking, but not yet, nothing happens
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-31
Updated: 2020-07-31
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:40:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25620718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naphorism/pseuds/Naphorism
Summary: You’re the kid who saved Batman. And no matter what happens, no matter where you go, that will always be true. And I will always owe you one.
Relationships: Alfred Pennyworth & Bruce Wayne, Jason Todd & Bruce Wayne
Comments: 5
Kudos: 101





	Of Birth Names and Tire Irons

**Author's Note:**

> This may make no sense if you don't know the Vale's foster son from The Telltale Series. Anyone who's played the game, happens to know anyway, or is willing to pick up the required information from Bruce and Alfred's brief summarisations in this fic, enjoy!

“I don’t believe it,” Batman muttered to himself. He stared down the Batmobile, eyes as wide as saucers underneath his cowl. Then he did something he had never done before in the dark depths of Crime Alley: he laughed.

“You do have to hand it to them, Master Bruce,” Alfred admitted into Batman’s ear, clearly watching through the cowl’s camera feed and thoroughly amused. “It takes remarkable courage to rip off the Batman’s buggy.”

“No kidding.” Batman knelt down, staring into one of the Batmobile’s cavernous wheel wells with a dull sort of shock. It was empty. Someone had succeeded in boosting both of his front tires in the very short time it had taken for him to do a rudimentary patrol of the surrounding streets. “I’m almost impressed.”

But as Batman was kneeling to appraise the situation, the criminal returned to the scene of the crime. Glancing furtively around the alley, a boy crept toward the Batmobile with a tire iron clenched in one fist. For the moment he seemed blissfully unaware of the fact that the Bat was crouching in the deep shadows surrounding the vehicle.

Batman waited until the boy had more or less reached his target — one of the remaining rear tires — before he made his presence known. Standing up with a huge and menacing swoop of his cape, he asked, “Well… come to finish the job, boy?”

“Whoops,” the boy said, sounding more bored than anything. He backed away a few paces as Batman drifted closer to him.

“You do realise that’s the Batmobile,” Batman growled. “Right?”

“Duh. You do realise you parked your car in Crime Alley,” the kid shot back with a deep scowl on his face. “Right?”

“You’re going to give me back my tires,” Batman demanded, crossing his arms across his heavily armoured chest.

The boy only shoved his tire iron behind his back, cocked an eyebrow, and asked, “Who said I took ‘em?” in a snotty tone of voice.

Batman found himself almost smiling at that. “What else is the tire iron for?”

The boy’s face contorted with rage and determination, and he yelled, “This!” swinging the tire iron directly into Batman’s abdomen with as much force as his relatively small arms could muster. “Try and catch me, you big boob!” he hollered over his shoulder as he sprinted away down the alley, stumbling over his worn sneakers.

Through the Batsuit’s armour the blow did very little damage, so it was only Batman’s conscious decision that allowed the boy to escape down the alley. He could have followed easily enough, but he intended to let the boy get a head start and lead him to wherever he was living. There was something different about him, and not just in his willingness to face the wrath of the Bat of Gotham.

“Penny-One,” Batman grunted, watching the boy’s rapidly retreating back, “run stills of that kid’s face through facial recognition. Something about him… I’m not sure. I have a feeling we’ve run into him before, or at least someone with a resemblance to him. Maybe a family member involved in a past case.”

“Right away sir,” agreed Alfred.

Batman took off after the boy, silent as could be. The kid’s red sweater was easy to spot, even through the gloom of Gotham at night and the glare of downtown traffic.

The kid wove through huge crowds and speeding cars and dark alleys like it was nothing, and Batman was duly impressed. The boy clearly knew this neighbourhood like the back of his hand. He sprinted through smaller and smaller winding alleys, slowing down more and more the further he got from the scene of his crime, until he finally slowed to a stop in an alley right next to an abandoned apartment complex. Leaning over to rest his hands on his knees and panting, he muttered, “Gotta cut down on smoking, Todd, your lungs are fucked,” to himself in a wheeze.

The boy looked about eleven. Batman almost made a sad little noise of commiseration, but heldhimself back in order not to risk giving away his location. By the time he had recovered from his internal lament at the apparent uselessness of Gotham’s lacklustre anti-smoking campaigns, the kid had scaled a huge portion the complex’s fire escape and jimmied open a third-floor window using his tire iron.

About sixty seconds after the kid had climbed in, dim light glowed through one of the apartment’s other grime-coated windows.

Batman shot his grapple and swung onto the fire escape. Wriggling through the open window was more of a challenge for him than it had been for the boy, but he managed. He found himself in an unsurprisingly derelict room. The tacky green plaster of the walls was crumbling near the corners of the room, exposing the wooden supports, and scraps of wood and metal were scattered across the floor. Stalking to the door and into the hall, he kept his ears sharp for noises and peered into every door he passed. He followed the glow of a lamp until he came to a much neater room than the others.

The room was small and in disrepair, but the floor looked as though it had actually seen a broom in the last decade. One corner seemed to be the boy’s home. Posters covered the crumbling walls until about halfway up, presumably the highest he could reach. There was a neatly organised bookcase, a tiny stereo system and a bunsen burner resting on top, the Batmobile’s tires leaning against its side. In the centre of it all: the boy, sitting on a carefully made mattress and lighting a cigarette.

Stepping into the room, Batman announced, “That’ll stunt your growth, kid,” conversationally.

The kid startled and dropped his lighter in surprise, but levelly took another drag of his cigarette once he realised who had spoken. “Hey, old man.”

Batman supposed a kid who could fend for himself on the mean streets of Gotham wouldn’t be intimidated all that easily, but his eyebrows still went up underneath the cowl. Most adults could barely speak without a stutter in the presence of the Bat. Adults who had never committed a crime worse than jaywalking, adults who were hardened criminals, adults born and bred in the gutters of Gotham; it didn’t matter. Batman was designed to be intimidating to anyone. Some random street kid who had just gotten caught red-handed committing a crime being this unaffected was a bit of a blow to the ego.

Thirty seconds of staring each other down later, the kid asked, “Whaddaya want?” in an exhausted sort of way.

Frowning, Batman suggested, “Ideally: to help you. But at the very least I’d like my tires back.”

“Lemme keep the tires then,” the kid demanded. “If you wanna help me. That’s help. You owe me one, anyway.”

“I owe you?” Batman asked, incredulous. “It seems as though you were the one breaking the law by taking what belongs to me. Wouldn’t that mean you owe me?”

The boy blew a thoughtful smoke ring then snapped, “Fine. I have a pulley system on the fire escape, we can lower ‘em back down. ’S long as it gets you off my back.” He put out his cigarette against a makeshift ashtray next to his mattress that might have been a teacup’s saucer in another life, stood up, then grabbed one of the tires. “You gonna help, or what?”

Still skeptical, Batman grabbed the second tire and followed the kid down the winding halls until they reached the window they had entered through. As the kid leaned out the window and deftly tied the first tire to a rope hooked over the railing, Batman pointed out, “I’m afraid it isn’t enough to just give me back my property,” as gently as he could.

The kid sighed and started lowering the tire. “You gonna fink to the cops, huh? Figures.”

“Not the cops. I think we do have to tell the juvenile authorities about you…”

“Social workers? Cut me a break!” the kid hissed, clambering away down the fire escape. He hollered, “I can fend for myself just fine! I know how to make it on the streets— and I like it there!” as he went.

Batman sighed and shot his grapple, swinging to the ground with the second tire under his free arm. He was waiting for the kid at the bottom of the fire escape when he stumbled down the last few steps.

Unable to manoeuvre around Batman’s bulk blocking the narrow alley, the kid glowered up at him instead. “I don’t want to end up in some crummy orphanage, or some foster home where I’m either someone’s pet charity case or treated like shit. I’m my own man!”

“Not all foster homes are like that,” Batman insisted.

“Look.” The kid crossed his arms rather aggressively. “I’m givin’ you back your tires because I can go out boosting cars anytime. I can make up for the loss, easy. But escaping foster care? Fuck nah.”

“What makes you so sure that you would need to escape foster care?”

The kid let out a brief and humourless laugh. “You really don’t remember, do you? I thought you were just too busy being a goody two-shoes to mention it.”

Batman just frowned at the boy.

“I’m Jason. Jason Todd.” Jason raised an eyebrow as though that should mean something.

“There were a multitude of matches for the boy’s face, sir,” Alfred supplied suddenly. “Mostly due to the low quality of the shots of his face I was forced to use. The algorithm was more or less grasping at straws, and none of the matches were particularly reliable. I wasn’t certain until this very moment.”

Holding out a hand and hoping that Jason would take it as the request to wait a moment that it was, Batman asked, “What is it, Penny-One?”

“His name gave it away. Three of the hundreds of matches were named Jason, but only one has any connection to the surname Todd. One Jason Peter Vale, aged thirteen.”

“Vale,” Batman repeated in horror, looking back at Jason.

Jason took a reflexive step back. He held himself tall enough and glowered enough that he almost managed to hide the fact that he was shaking. He clearly wanted to curl up in terror, like he had all those years ago, but seemed to have trained the instinct out of himself in the intervening years. “Fuck off. I’m not a Vale. Never was.”

“The Vales had his name changed when they adopted him. He— oh, good lord.” Alfred sighed sadly. “Give me a moment.”

Batman knew that cases with abused children were always particularly hard on Alfred. He also remembered the multitude and extremity of the tragedies listed in Jason Vale’s files from when he read them briefly after the Lady Arkham case wrapped up. Atrocities listed in bullet points, clinical and cold, as though they were items on a shopping list and not the events of a real child’s life. Frankly, the Vales weren’t much more than a period at the end of the criminally long run-on sentence that was Jason’s history of mistreatment.

Alfred took a deep breath. “Born Jason Peter Todd, to Catherine and Willis Todd. His father was a low-rent thug, in and out of jail, working low in the ranks of many Gotham criminals. One of his incarcerations was for child abuse. He was eventually killed by the leader of the gang he was working for at the time. Jason’s mother fell into substance abuse at a young age, and it claimed her life through heroin overdose. Jason was placed in the system. Within a year he was adopted by the Vales and witness to their murder at the hands of Lady Arkham.”

“I’m intimately familiar with that part,” Batman murmured. Looking at Jason, he suddenly felt like a much worse detective than he generally thought he was. The sharp widow’s peak of Jason’s curls and the striking blue-grey eyes set under heavy brows hadn’t changed at all. He was very obviously the same child Batman had found cowering in the cupboard at the Vale residence five years ago, once a person knew what they were looking for.

“He never had the chance to testify against the Vales, since their abuse only came to light after their deaths. It was, however, determined that they could have been brought in for child abuse, including multiple counts of battery, aggravated assault, and false imprisonment,” Alfred finished sadly. “He vanished into thin air around one year ago, presumably by running away from one of Gotham's overcrowded orphanages. Batman. Please… be careful with the boy. You’ve scared him before.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t recognise you, kid,” Batman said gently, much more Bruce than Batman. “You’ve grown.”

Jason scowled up at Batman, managing to be somewhat intimidating despite his diminutive size. He seemed to have grown into all the anger and distrust that his life had taught him was necessary. When Batman had last met him he had still been nothing but a scared child. This version of Jason seemed much more capable of taking a few whacks at an attack drone than the version of Jason who actually had.

“I do owe you,” Batman conceded. “I stand by what I said that night. No matter what happens, no matter where you go. I will always owe you one. And what I owe you is worth more than a few tires.”

Scoffing, Jason mumbled, “Damn straight. You still gonna rat me out?” He then added something under his breath that sounded an awful lot like, “Ratman.”

Humming noncommittally, Batman thought. He wasn’t quite sure what the right course of action was. Jason did not want to return to foster care. He had very good reasons for it, seemed to be doing alright on his own, and Batman owed him considerably more than a small favour such as allowing him to get away with tire theft. But he was also a child fighting his own way through life in Gotham’s underbelly by resorting to crime, and continuing down his current path would bring him nowhere good. Batman certainly couldn't leave him alone on the streets in good conscience.

“Old man?” Jason asked cautiously, looking very ready to turn and run.

Batman smiled slightly. “Once I get the tires back on the Batmobile, how would you feel about a midnight snack?”

Jason looked at Batman blankly. “That’s not a euphemism, is it? ‘Cause I don’t do that.”

“I asked exactly what I meant to ask, Jason.” Batman took a step toward Jason.

Pulling his tire iron out of the kangaroo pocket of his hoodie, Jason brandished it in front of himself like a sword. He didn’t back up as Batman got closer, electing to plant his feet and stand his ground instead. “I dunno what you think you’re doing, grandpa. Step it the fuck back.” He swung wildly as Batman took another step.

The tire iron was stopped mid-swing by one of Batman’s gauntleted fists. “I’m only going to ask you this once,” he announced, holding the tire iron fast. “So give some serious thought to your answer…”

“What?” Jason hissed through his teeth, struggling to yank his tire iron out of Batman’s grip.

Batman grinned. “… Are you hungry?”

Jason looked startled, then his stomach growled loudly. His mouth remained silent.

“What kind of food do you like best, lad?” Batman asked when it seemed clear that Jason wasn’t going to say anything. He let go of the tire iron slowly in the hopes that it wouldn’t inspire Jason to take another swing.

Looking at Batman suspiciously but lowering his tire iron anyway, Jason admitted, “Burgers.”

A very teenage answer, but it would do. Batman agreed, “Once I’ve reattached the tires, we can go through a drive-thru.”

“You mean… You’re gonna let me inside the Batmobile?” Jason asked incredulously.

“I think anyone who’s gone up against a drone controlled by the Penguin and won has earned the privilege to take her for a joyride," Batman admitted. "Don’t you?”

“Yeah.” Jason smiled, looking pleased with himself. “Yeah, I do.”

Bruce, somewhere under the veneer of Batman, knew that he wouldn’t be turning Jason in to the juvenile authorities. Tonight or ever. But he was pretty certain Jason was going to have a new home anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> The most unrealistic thing about The Telltale Series was that Bruce didn’t immediately adopt the Vale’s foster son, so I made it happen. With a twist!  
> I've seen people theorise about him being Dick or Jason, so... I'm not original, but nobody had written it yet. The speech Batman gave to the Vale kid about how his emotions would make him stronger someday when he channeled them had huge future robin energies, but being in a Gotham foster home didn't make as much sense for Dick as for Jason.  
> This used some dialogue from RHATO as well as the original Jason-stealing-the-wheels scene. It’s not precisely faithful to either one, obviously. The summary is the line Batman says to the Vale's foster kid after they fight the drone, word-for-word.
> 
> Thanks for reading. I love kudos and comments and bookmarks and frankly anything at all, so it's all greatly appreciated.


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